Perspectives from Week One

 

One of the best things about inviting new friends to come visit Hot Springs is how I get to see everything again from a brand new set of lenses.  This is particularly true when the new friend is a graduate of film making at WLU and is taking in her experiences, at least in part, through the eye of her art form.

With Evangeline's permission, I offer these 'sample shots' as a framework for describing our first days here.  (All photo credits: Evangeline Wilton)

Home at Hot Springs

With apologies to those that have reminded me of the dismal weather many are enduring in southwestern Ontario right now, I have to say, this November in northern Thailand has been amazing.  The cool night gives way to warmer days with little to no humidity to speak of.  We pretty much stayed at Hot Springs for the first four days, allowing our bodies the time to adjust, which I have to say is so much easier without the heat.  This means we were able to enjoy the relative quiet of the countryside, and the simple beauty of the mountains that surround us here.

This is not to say that there weren't a fair share of little adventures.  Like when Suradet showed us a hole in the ground at least 15 cm in diameter and said that it was the entrance to a spider's home. Or like how I now know how to kill a scorpion myself.  Or the discovery of rather large snails.  Or the mysterious disappearance of one of Evangeline's sandals after worship one morning.  Apparently the dogs think farang shoes are more interesting.

Evangeline is proving to be a quick study in the language, picking up new words and phrases every day, and taking the initiative to use what she's learning in conversation.  This, plus the daily reading of the English books we brought with us, has given way to her being very easily embraced into the family.  I personally am enjoying the deeper conversations that happen over meal times as Thai culture, philosophies of ministries, and our own spirituals journeys provide us with lots to process as we get to know one another better.

Sunday Morning

My heart is so full.  I am with a sweet and simple and exuberant community of faith who want nothing else but to be together and lift their faces toward the God who redeems them from hopelessness.  My feeble attempt to speak anything at all into these precious folks with lives more complex than I can ever imagine, is followed by another powerful time of prayer and Communion.  I am humbled to be included.  How is it that I get to be here, doing this intimate thing we do together as the Church?  How amazing it will always be to me that somehow God saw fit to give me such sweet, spiritually intimacy with people half a world away.  These are the questions that keep me breathless, keep me grounded.



Thai Style Planning

By Monday we feel ready to head out for an outing to the Umbrella Factory and surrounding shops.   But two of the kids are running a fever and won't be going to school.  Nothing serious, but enough to keep us home again for the day.  At least that's what we think.  Being more used to 'going with the flow' by now, I open my computer to go with plan B and work on the sermon I will be preaching in Thai at the end of the month (a long and somewhat tedious process of writing given the translation necessary).

Literally two paragraphs and 10 minutes later, Suradet arrives to suggest that we could take a quick visit to Hot Springs Park.  So plan B gives way to plan C - girl's morning out.  This ends up including treating the female staff (and ourselves) to Thai massage, lunch, and the purchase of a traditional Thai skirt and top for Evangeline.  With a call home to find out that the kids are doing fine and won't be needing to see a doctor today after all, we do a 'quick' side trip to a seamstress in Yupa's home village of Ongkan to finish off the skirt with proper seams and a belt.  She is teased that there will be an extra charge because she is so beautiful.  This tall and lovely mysterious creature from a land far away.

We stop to watch Yupa's Mom fold banana leaves around portions of fermented herbs to sell at her noodle hut later.  Then there's a stop at the 7/11 at the end of the road to reactivate my Thai phone, and buy iced coffee for the Dads who have stayed home with the sick children.  By now all this 'not having an outing today' had taken us to 3:00 p.m. 





Time enough to prepare for evening worship Bible and ESL before supper.


And that was the day.  The day of not going anywhere and not really getting much 'done' either.  And it so feels like I'm in Thailand.

Tuesday we actually do visit the Umbrella Factory and I wonder again at the slow skills of carving wood and making the paper and stringing the umbrellas and painting the beauty onto them.  This visit I notice something I hadn't before, that Princess Diana had visited here in 1988.  There are pictures and a 7 meter umbrella made for the occasion.  The picture shows her standing in the exact spot I am now.  And it seems a small world and an enormous world all at the same time.

On a matter of functional business, part of being a children's home in Thailand, we were to stop in for a quick signing of some needed papers at the district government offices, a leftover errand from the day before when we were told to come back today.  Today we are told to wait for an hour.  After an hour we are told to come back on Thursday.  And now we are back home and it is again 3:00 p.m.

And so it goes.

English and Being Strong and Too Many Ka-nomes 

With all that can't be planned in these first few days, I am even more grateful for the preparation I've been doing, and the help of Ann and Derek at Highview over the past several months, in order to move us now through a three unit study called "Strong, Smart and Savoury", a series of lessons aimed at helping us live more Biblically.  This of course includes our ESL segment every night, focusing right now on a vocabulary list of 100 words, getting the gist of English verb tenses (something the Thai language does not have), and pressing into phonics with the help of the English books we have brought.  "Fox on a box" and "Shark in the park" provide ample examples and samples.

At the 7/11 I also purchased some little cake like treats - 'ka-nome' - to use in our lesson on contentment.  It's surprising how happy we might be to be given one, until the person next to us is given ten.  In the end they are all shared evenly, and a smiley face sticker is added to the zippered pouch holding all our little lesson tokens to remind us how be be strong for God.

So, this is what takes us through all the hours and minutes.  Just being here doing it, living it, knowing it, feeling it.  And then, spent, laying down a the end of the day, sleeping well in the cool of the overnight, refreshed in the morning to being again with sleepy, gentle singing.

There are more plans.  But, we'll wait and see.  A lot of that going on right now.